Congrats to Pitchfork on the Wikipedia scandal of 2026

This time, the Wikipedia drama is happening on TikTok.

On Thursday, April 23rd, a friend sent me a Pitchfork article titled “Meet the Young Wikipedians Writing the Front Page of Music History.” I forgot to read it or respond but I did open it in a new tab on my phone with the intention of eventually reading it.

Two days later (Saturday, April 25th), before I had gotten around to reading said article, he texted me a TikTok video that I didn’t watch but that I intended to watch.

Another two days later, before I had read the article or watched the TikTok video, he followed up with:

Screenshot from my texts with my friend Mark.

(Here’s the Fantano TikTok video he’s referencing.)

After skimming the article and watching both TikTok videos, I understood why my friend was so insistent that I pay attention to this. This is a top-shelf Wikipedia scandal and if there’s one thing I’m here to write about, it’s a top-shelf Wikipedia scandal. Perhaps one could call it Wikipedia drama? Either way, yes, I realized I must learn more about it and subsequently write about it.

My only hesitation was that it seemed the story had already been covered. b.nwhite had blown it open on TikTok and surely, I thought, all the other websites that cover such things will have written about it.

So I googled pitchfork wikipedia scandal and saw… nothing. Or, very little. The top result for pitchfork wikipedia scandal brought me to a Reddit thread that looks like this:

Here’s the rest of the Google SERP. You may note the fifth result is the TikTok video by b.nwhite, linked-to at the top of this article.

Why does no one seem to care about this other than the TikToker b.nwhite, Anthony Fantano, and some redditor whose thread was deleted? Is there a “Pitchfork Wikipedia Scandal” at all? What is going on and why am I writing about this and why is no one else?

Let me summarize the situation, for those of you who don’t want to read a Pitchfork article and watch two TikToks

Here’s what’s happening, as I understand it: the Pitchfork article tells a story but it doesn’t tell the story. Or at least not the full story. The more I learn about it, the more I think the untold story is the more interesting one.

The Pitchfork article tells us that some excited young people edit Wikipedia a lot. You can read it if you want. It is written by a young journalist named Kieran Press-Reynolds and a lot of it concerns a young Wikipedia editor named Aradicus. According to Press-Reynolds, Aradicus

• Is 20 years old.

• Lives in Manchester.

• Has been editing Wikipedia since he was 14.

• Has been banned repeatedly for edit warring and violating other Wikipedia policies (more on this below.)

• Has put in “1000 hours” editing since last July.

• Edits lots and lots of music articles, mostly about niche and new music genres.

The article seems to be written for a target audience of music fans who don’t edit Wikipedia and don’t know much about it, written by someone who is relatively new to writing about Wikipedia.

The most relevant details not present in the Pitchfork story, as provided by Ben White in his video, are that Aradicus:

• Has a fawning paragraph on his Wikipedia user page about the greatness of journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds; said paragraph has been there since July.

• Has added citations to Kieran Press-Reynolds’ work to articles across Wikipedia.

• Has added Kieran Press-Reynolds’ name to the body of various Wikipedia articles, including the article Simon Reynolds, the father of Press-Reynolds.

• Created a redirect that leads Wikipedia users to the section “Personal life” on the Simon Reynolds article when someone clicks “Kieran Press-Reynolds” anywhere on Wikipedia; this, in turn, means the Kieran Press-Reynolds hyperlink is always blue, rather than red.

Yes, Aradicus’s Wikipedia user page truly contains this homage to Press-Reynolds which, as White pointed out, it has contained since 2025:

THANK YOU, Kieran Press-Reynolds, for reviving contemporary music journalism, most of the work you’ve done for Pitchfork and the Face in 2024-25 has allowed for many articles and developments to be named and added to Wikipedia. I hope critics fall out of prominence, instead replaced by young personality-driven culture heads born in the 2000s-2010s that are concerned with the real avant-garde forming on the internet rather than baseless word-salad reviews of irrelevant indie rock bands playing genres that haven’t been innovative since the 90s. Lester Bangs didn’t die for the Fantan0-ist era of music criticism. I’m Greg Shaw’s reincarnation.

As White describes it on TikTok: “You’re writing about your biggest fan and pretending they just like happen to be the most fascinating person in the world.”

Let’s go a little deeper

There are a few things White didn’t point out in their TikTok video. Specifically:

• In many of the articles created or edited by Aradicus, Press-Reynolds’ name is the majority of the citations.

• Press-Reynolds appears to have first made contact with Aradicus via Aradicus’s user talk page on April 15, 2026; the article “Meet the Young Wikipedians Writing the Front Page of Music History” was live on April 23, 2026. The conversation began on Wikipedia and appears to have moved to Discord.

• Aradicus has violated a few more Wikipedia policies than Press-Reynolds describes.

Here is that first interaction between Press-Reynolds and Aradicus, on Wikipedia:

hi i am Kieran Press-Reynolds - someone sent me your page it’s sick, thanks for reading/citing my stuff. i couldn’t find any other way of reaching out. would you wanna chat on Discord/talk somehow? would love to learn about this world of Wikipedia writing maybe for a column Kpressreynolds (talk) 20:59, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

Wow this is a crazy HONOUR. My discord is [REDACTED] Aradicus (talk) 21:05, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

While my impression of Aradicus, based on Kieran Press-Reynolds’ article, was that he had done some zany editing in his youth, it appears that most of the transgressions against Wikipedia have been more recent.

Here’s a rough timeline of his editing career:

1. Created account in 2021.

2. Blocked for being a “Spam / advertising-only account” in May 2023.

3. Subject of sockpuppet investigation in January 2024.

4. Subject of sockpuppet investigation in June 2024.

5. Subject of sockpuppet investigation twice in December 2024.

6. Unblocked in June 2025.

7. Adds tribute to Kieran Press-Reynolds to user page in July 2025.

8. Blocked from editing “Post-punk” and “Gothic rock” for a month, beginning October 20 2025.

9. Blocked for edit warring on October 28; block lifted one week later.

10. Blocked for “lack of competence and disruptive editing” for one month, beginning December 13 2025.

While this is a lot of naughty behavior in the eyes of Wikipedia, I think it aligns with the picture Press-Reynolds paints of Aradicus. That of an enthusiastic and obsessive editor whose actions create conflict with other Wikipedia editors.

The trouble, as White points out, is that Press-Reynolds fails to disclose how much of Aradicus’s editing promotes the work of Press-Reynolds either directly or indirectly. Kieran Press-Reynolds is mentioned or cited on over 100 Wikipedia articles; Aradicus seems to have hand in editing the vast majority of these articles.

There are some exceptions. For example, Kieran Press-Reynolds is cited in the Adam Friedland article, but Aradicus’s name is nowhere in that’s article history.

To understand these edits made by Aradicus as they relate to Kieran Press-Reynolds, consider the article Yabujin.

Let’s take a look at the Yabujin article.

I had never heard of Yabujin until today (or maybe yesterday). I learned he’s a Lithuanian rapper and producer. Also, according to his Wikipedia article, he’s associated with the genres “cloud rap, hexD, and jumpstyle.” I don’t know what any of those things are but I believe it to be true.

Here are a few excerpts from the Wikipedia article for Yabujin:

Writing for Pitchfork, music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds noted that in Tarulis’ album covers and videos “bizarre figures stretch and elongate, their voices muffled and mangled; images superimpose like poorly designed clickbait; the text is foreign and stuffed with symbols.”

And

According to Press-Reynolds, Tarulis is a “mysterious” artist who has released material under several aliases across many different accounts and names, often deleting them or disappearing for long periods.

And

Press-Reynolds described Tarulis as “underground ephemera”,[5] and believed that he had never done an interview, only released one piece of merchandise, and never performed live.

And

According to music journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds, writing for Pitchfork, Tarulis’ work is influenced by the “decayed glimmer” of the Internet rap collective Reptilian Club Boyz along with the “waterlogged pixels” of producer $ludgehammer.

And

Press-Reynolds noted that fans “compared Yabujin’s work to an ‘ARG,’ or alternate reality game, because there’s so much to get invested in”.

In the body of the article, “Yabujin” appears nine times. “Press-Reynolds” appears seven times.

And down in the References section, we see that out of the 8 articles cited, Kieran Press-Reynolds wrote five of them.

Now, you might be asking: what does this all mean and why exactly should I care? Let’s finally start answering that question.

So what exactly is happening here?

What I find really intriguing here is that it’s still not entirely clear what’s happening. And while I think I’m the first person to sit down and write about a whole big thing about this, people are talking about it. The comment section is going wild on White’s TikTok, Wikipediocracy has taken notice, there was the aforementioned deleted Reddit thread, and longtime editor Hemiauchenia¹ left a standard “Managing a conflict of interest” message on Aradicus’s user talk page:

Boilerplate “Managing a conflict of interest” message

That’s not the only message added to Aradicus’s user talk page lately. I also left a message there. And not just there: I reached out to the three major parties involved in this: editor and music fan Aradicus, journalist Kieran Press-Reynolds², and editor and TikToker Ben White.

So far, I’ve heard back from two of the three.

I’m going to try to answer this question: what is happening here? There are four possible explanations that I can think of:

1. Theory #1: Press-Reynolds played fast and loose. Someone showed Aradicus’s Wikipedia user page to Kieran Press-Reynolds. Press-Reynolds got excited and said “this seems like a story” and turned around their Pitchfork article in a week, not considering (or maybe not even knowing) the extent to which they were omitting the edits Aradicus has made and how those edits functionally benefit the web presence of Press-Reynolds.

2. Theory #2: Press-Reynolds wrote the article as a thank you to Aradicus. Kieran Press-Reynolds wrote the article as an appreciation to Aradicus, after learning about all the cool things Aradicus has done. A tribute in Pitchfork in response to Aradicus’s tribute to Press-Reynolds.

3. Theory #3: It’s a long-standing quid pro quo. Aradicus and Press-Reynolds have some kind of long-standing quid-pro-quo relationship, in which Aradicus makes edits on the behalf of Press-Reynolds in exchange for… a Pitchfork article? Doesn’t totally work, but maybe that’s it?

4. Theory #4: Scooby-Doo. Popular among the TikTok commenters under Ben White’s TikTok. What if Aradicus and Kieran Press Reynolds have been the same person THE ENTIRE TIME?

I am leaning to this being Theory #1 but #2 seems possible. And when I asked Ben White what he thought was happening, without telling him what I considered to be the four working theories, he responded by endorsing Theory #2:

I’m gonna go with Occam’s razor on this one and say that Press-Reynolds and Aradicus probably started communicating once they left a message on his talk page, because the alternative (that the interaction was fabricated to make people think that this was their first time talking) feels a bit too convoluted for me. I think Press-Reynolds absolutely knew how much of a fan Aradicus was before writing the article, though -- they say as much in that talk page message -- and it seems to me like the article was done as a sort of favor to Aradicus for repeatedly citing their work on Wikipedia.

As White put it in their TikTok video: “[Press-Reynolds is] writing about [their] biggest fan and pretending they just like happen to be the most fascinating person in the world.”

White also said something else that stuck with me, that I think helps explain what we are seeing here:

Aradicus is probably just a huge fan of Kieran Press-Reynolds...I personally only knew of [Kieran Press-Reynolds] tangentially before making the video, but I think people severely underestimate the extent to which Wikipedia allows people who are obsessed with people you didn’t realize even had fans to go crazy over them. Like, for example, almost every single Wikipedia page about Meghan Trainor is a featured article.

I understand both the sentiment being conveyed by White and the fandom Aradicus feels, based on my own experiences editing and some of the conflicts I’ve had with other editors.

Based on my email exchanges with White and my analysis of Aradicus’s edits and the description Press-Reynolds gave of Aradicus, I think they have one thing in common: they both edit Wikipedia for love of the game.

The real question: why does anyone edit Wikipedia?

When discussing this situation with my friend Mark—the same one who texted me and tipped me off to this entire situation—he told me there was one thing he couldn’t wrap his head around: “Why is Aradicus making all these edits to Wikipedia?”

As mentioned above, I reached out to Aradicus.

Here’s what I asked:

Have you seen the TikTok about your edits related to Kieran-Press [sic]³ Reynolds? Would you be interested in giving me a comment or more on it for my Substack I write about Wikipedia etc? You can reach me at DFrederickLovett at gmail dot com. I can share my Substack if you’re interested in other writing I’ve done of this sort.

Here is the response I received, via Aradacisus’s Wikipedia user talk page, 28 hours later:

Imagine it’s 2013 and you make a wikipedia page for Vaporwave. You realize all the sources at the moment are just Adam Harper and then you write a message on your user page thanking them for their music journo contributions and lambast legacy media because it’s funny Harper is focusing on something that isn’t widely talked about yet. Is there a conflict of interest if Harper or David Keenan decides to interview a crop of YouTubers who focus on Vaporwave or Hypnagogic pop in 2013? The Internet is stupid and spreads rumours around and that’s pretty much all there is to say

As I said above: love of the game.

Aradicus loves new music and editing Wikipedia. Aradicus might not even be a Kieran Press-Reynolds fan but is moreseo a fan of what Kieran Press-Reynolds is enabling through their work: lots of citations to empower the editing and creating of lots of Wikipedia articles.

Which I recognize, to anyone who doesn’t edit Wikipedia, might seem so bonkers as to require a conspiracy theory.

I will also note that, moments before responding to me on his talk page, Aradicus deleted the “Managing a conflict of interest” message left by Hemiauchenia.

If Aradicus reads this, I’ll offer one small piece of advice:

Something that wasn’t COI (the dynamic between Aradicus and Press-Reynolds) might have become COI, based on the article Press-Reynolds wrote about Aradicus and friends. And deleting a “Managing a conflict of interest” message left by a longtime editor is probably not a prudent move, especially given the history of bans and allegations of sockpuppetry.

If Kieran Press-Reynolds ever does get a Wikipedia article, Aradicus should not be the editor to create it and should be careful about any edits he makes to it. I go overboard in my declaring of COI these days, as I’ve learned that I would rather declare something and learn I was being over cautious than make it seem like I have something to hide.

But we’re not done yet.

Pitchfork’s editorial standards might need some tightening

I have shared previously the article The Verge wrote about Wikipedia, for which journalist Josh Dzieza and I talked at length and exchanged several emails. He initially reached out to me in March 2025 before finally publishing the article in September 2025. Nearly six months elapsed between our first conversation and the time the article went live, during which he interviewed various people and did enormous amounts of research. As I’ve said before, it’s one of the best things about Wikipedia I’ve read.

I also had to talk at length with a fact checker who verified my quotes and some of the analysis Dzieza had done for the article. That was when I realized The Verge was not messing around.

One of the reasons I started Edit History is because I want to provide a more accurate view of Wikipedia, from both my perspective and the perspective of other people who understand it. This includes both positive and critical views of Wikipedia. In general, I wish people understood Wikipedia better.

Well, not just Wikipedia. I wish people understood the internet better.

I think Kieran Press-Reynolds seems like a reasonably good journalist and writer.⁴ They also seem to have met some very cool people and they write about some cool topics for some cool outlets.

But maybe Wikipedia was too big of a subject for Pitchfork without doing more due diligence. Perhaps it was an editor who failed on this one. It must be someone’s job to prevent something like this from slipping through without more oversight.

I will say that I hope Kieran Press-Reynolds writes more about this because I think the untold story is more interesting than the story we’ve gotten so far. How did Press-Reynolds first learn about Aradicus? How did it make Press-Reynolds feel? Are they still communicating? Will they write a followup that tells the parts of the story we didn’t get the first time?

If a fan can’t edit Wikipedia, who can?

Assuming that the only issue here is that Kieran Press-Reynolds didn’t tell the extent of Aradicus’s KRP fandom and that the Pitchfork editors didn’t catch it, I do want to note that Aradicus may be the ideal Wikipedia editor in terms of interest and enthusiasm. Well, also the sockpuppeting and edit warring is bad. And some of the shit talking seems excessive.

But really. Who better to create new articles than a person who is completely obsessed with the topic at hand and is willing to dedicate thousands of hours to it? While I’m not convinced we need Wikipedia articles on all the topics Aradicus has created, I am genuinely happy that “Internet aesthetic” and “Landfill indie” both have articles and they seem to be good articles.

On the other hand, some of it does remind me a little of the issues I described in The endless drama of “List of American superhero films.” Which isn’t great.

But I keep thinking about the fandom element. Why have I done so many edits on the articles On Cinema and List of On Cinema episodes and Mark Proksch and Joe Estevez? Eric André and Biff Wiff? Roberto Bolaño and “List of metafictional works” and Dead & Company?

Being a fan. Love of the game.

One last note

I just have to say that I have no idea what the vast majority of the music genres are mentioned in this article. If you feel old or out-of-touch reading this, welcome to the club.

1. Hemiauchenia. Not a name I expect to ring bells for most of you, but this same editor was involved in the Barry Schwartz AfD discussion.

2. I reached out to Press-Reynolds via their Wikipedia talk page and LinkedIn. Their website seems to be down so that didn’t work. Twitter would be another option but I don’t use Twitter. I also followed them on Instagram in case that gets their attention.

3. I don’t know why I thought their first name was hyphenated rather than the surname.

4. Nice time to remind any readers that I do not personally identify as a journalist. I have no journalistic training or education and most of what I write is self-published and self-edited. I consider myself to be a writer. (I’m also a marketer.)